Behind the Curtain of West End Girl — How Interior Design Sets the Scene for Lily Allen’s (and Pop Music’s) Most Vulnerable Work

It’s not lost on Anna Fleischle that her working relationship with Lily Allen began at roughly the same point as the opening song on the hit album West End Girl. Anna was the set designer for 2:22 A Ghost Story, the West End show referenced in the album’s titular track, in which Lily took on a leading role in 2021.

Anna worked again with Lily as set designer on two further plays, and when Lily had finished the soon-to-be critically-acclaimed album, she asked the set designer to step into the role of creative director for West End Girl’s adaptation to the stage. That remit has included one-off performances, including a turn on Saturday Night Live, as well as the tour itself — first previewed on smaller stages in the UK, now heading to the US, then moving into larger arena venues back in the UK in the summer.

West End Girl sees the singer alone on a stage, a space transformed into an apartment with a sort of glamorous ‘dinge’. The plush shag carpeting should set the tone for an old-world sort of opulence, and in certain lights it does — in rich combination with the teal-blue curtain, specifically — but in other lights the sheen fades, and it brings a glumness.

It’s decidedly a domestic space. This isn’t Lily in showgirl mode — it’s more reminiscent of a one-woman play, with a set that slowly deconstructs as the story unfolds. There’s a tension between the home and theatrical design in what Anna has created. The rooms are furnished with things that don't, largely, feel out of the ordinary — beds, chairs, floor lamps — but then the stage is also flanked by a grand Austrian drape that seems pulled directly from old Hollywood. Video plays projected across a voile curtain, not live footage from the stage; instead, the blurred projections feel like a glimpse inside Lily’s head.

“There was a clear focus on wanting to be intimate,” Anna tells me, in a conversation stolen between production meetings the week West End Girl first hit the stage. “Lily said right from the beginning, ‘I just want it to be me, I need to perform this on my own.’ My job was to figure out how you can create something with intimacy that allows the audience into something painful and personal,” she says.

When it came to creating the aesthetic world of West End Girl, Anna had a visual framework — after all, it’s a deeply personal work that finds art in the specificity. Where modern pop songs are often autobiographical enough to court intrigue enough to appeal to the fame-curious but vague enough to preserve a semblance of privacy, Lily created something that went beyond simple storytelling. West End Girl is an exercise in lore-building. World-building, even. It inspired new additions to our very cultural language, while offering an intimate, vulnerable glimpse into a very specific trauma.

It’s a story that comes with the lore of the ‘palace’ — the Brooklyn brownstone designed by Billy Cotton that Lily once shared with her ex-husband, and which was featured by Architectural Digest as a home tour back in 2023. We found a palace on the perfect street, you really sold me on the dream, Lily sings on West End Girl — as opposed to the Pussy Palace, the now-iconic moniker used for a separate West Village apartment. While many interior designers are used to getting their shout-out on an AD house tour, fewer get lyrics in seminal pop albums: Billy Cotton got sorted, all the furniture ordered, Lily sings in the opening track.

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Like her music, the Brooklyn ‘palace’ has a specificity, this time in aesthetic, and one that’s become embedded in the lore of the album. In many of the rooms, walls were papered with highly decorative wallpapers, specifically from Parisian wallcovering makers Zuber; the bathroom carpeted with an ornate Pierre Frey carpet, and windows fitted with fabric blinds in traditional gathered and pleated styles (not un-reminiscent of the theatrical Austrian style used on the stage). The home made a splash at the time, but Google searches for ‘Lily Allen Architectural Digest’ saw volumes twice as high after the release of West End Girl as when it was first released on Architectural Digest’s YouTube channel.

For SNL, Lily’s first live performance of songs from the album, Anna and Lily wanted to set the tone for what was to come: “giving a little bit of the world we want to go into,” Anna says. “We had elements like the shag pile rug — a symbol of homeliness and safety, the place where you think these things shouldn't be happening. They are supposed to hold you and be warm and welcoming. Subversive things happen within the heart of where we should feel safe.”

This set also played with the autobiographical nature of the album and the idea of ‘familiarity’ in another way. “If you start with something familiar, and let people sit in that familiarity — "Oh, I know this, I've seen this before" — you can then deconstruct and disrupt that. We went quite far with it on Saturday Night Live, having actual items from her house on stage. People might recognize it as her actual drawing room.”

For Anna, it acts as a commentary on the sometimes parasocial relationships the world has with famous people. “When we see anyone in the media or TV, we feel we know what's going on in their life. The danger is becoming complacent — I wanted the design to question that, and accept that, really, they are no different from you. The emotions are the same. If someone loses something, it doesn't feel different just because everybody knows who you are.”

In the transition to the tour stage, the arc of the story sees these interiors, which set the scene for West End Girl, slowly broken down. “It starts with something familiar, rich, and lush — the luxury of things we think we need, and we’ll have when we’ve ‘made it’. Without people noticing, I strip it back, and back, and carry on stripping it back until all we have is a bare stage and a woman in the middle singing to the audience, telling them her story.”

It sounds serious, and in parts, West End Girl certainly is, but it’s also an album infused with a wit and cheek that’s also brought to the staging. During Madeline, a song that plays out as an accusatory conversation over an infidelity, the stage lighting picks out an audience member, to whom Lily sings the song directly; while during the aforementioned Pussy Palace, the singer unloads the contents of a plastic shopping bag onto the stage. The contents? If you know, you know.

“I wanted the space around her to be that as well,” Anna says, “that there can be a lot of fun in it, quirkiness, and something a bit unusual. Like the fridge,” she says, referring to the pink Smeg fridge from which Lily emerges with a large cloth emblazoned with ‘receipts’ — texts, Instagram messages, and receipts linked to the story of West End Girl. “I really liked the idea that you can just have these things there because they are supporting a visual metaphor — they are not there because they make sense necessarily, but I think we all instinctively know how they do make sense.”

When we’re more used to seeing contemporary popstars flanked with dancers [“if you think West End Girl should have dancers on stage, you and I are listening to different albums,” Anna says], for this stage performance, the set design takes an even-more important supporting role in the story-telling, but as Anna suggests, it’s not always one that an audience takes at face value.

“There is something interesting in how, even though we live in a visual world, we are untrained in recognizing the influence design has on us,” Anna says. “Design is underestimated as purely surface. You can portray things and make audiences feel things without them knowing where it came from.”

The magic of Lily’s first shows arrives in this feeling, the cross-section where music and performance meet design, but these emotions also feel bound to the intimacy of the venues. How, then, will it translate into arenas as Lily takes on venues such as London’s O2 later this year, I ask? “I’ll let you know that when I’ve figured it out myself,” Anna responds.